Hannah Barton: Thinking Through Memes

Internet memes are a contemporary cultural phenomenon, and consequently is commonplace to think of memes primarily in the context of the internet. But memes have long existed, if by other names. As a historic corpus, memes comprise an array of communicative cultural productions. They are stories. They are folklore, song, dialects, urban legends, and jokes. Any study of memes - internet or otherwise - will tell us something about the conditions that produced them. Just as both the structure and the content of an epic poem reveals much about the era that produced it, and just as the emergence of the printed novel in the 18th century tells us something about the social and technological changes being experienced at that time, internet memes - which are co-produced by extant technologies and cultural conditions - can tell us things about the moment in which they were created.

This lecture will argue that to understand what an internet meme is, we must: 1) place them in their due historic context, and 2) distinguish between the creative practices that produce memes - which I term the memetic practices - and the meme instance itself. In respect to this, internet memes are produced by particular and contemporary deployments of memetic practices, which call on a specific constellation of cultural and technological factors.

The lecture will also feature the works developed by Diffractions Collective, Slash Dash Backslash and BCAAsystem, who will thus introduce their current collaborative project devoted to the use of augmented reality (AR).